First, the Cumberland’s emulation emitters gave off a burst of electromagnetic energy of the kind associated with a catastrophic computer core shutdown. Then came a cascade of other emissions, simulating the failure of numerous other systems throughout the ship, followed by a burst of incoherent gravitons and the venting of hydrogen plasma, indicative of an emergency decompression of the ship’s fusion reactor. Another emission mimicked the ship switching over to its auxiliary Rickover-type fission reactor to supply its basic power needs. When that was done, the emitters began to transmit a gamut of signals by which the Cumberland essentially emulated itself in a crippled condition, while its stealth systems kept the true condition of the ship hidden from view.
At a nod from Nelson, LeBlanc signaled Fleishman, his man on Drives, to cut the power to the main sublight drive, allowing the ship to coast.
“There, sir,” Nelson said. “As far as the Krag are concerned, we’re practically dead in the water. Mobility limited to maneuvering thrusters only, weapons off-line, point-defense and deflectors dead, main computer cooked, vessel subsisting on auxiliary power.”
“Outstanding. Tactical, what’s Hotel six up to?”
“Skipper, he’s reducing speed,” said Bartoli. “Deceleration profile shows he’ll stop about 425,000 kills off our bow.”
“Outstanding.”
“Picking up active scans, Oscar and Victor band,” said Kasparov. “Nothing too powerful. He’s not probing us. My estimate is that he’s refining his firing solution.”
“Hotel six is now station-keeping 424,853 kilometers off our bow,” said Bartoli. “I’m expecting her to fire her missiles momentarily.”
“Very well,” said Max. “Everybody hold what you’ve got.”
Not the most orthodox order, but everyone understood it.
“Romeo band target acquisition tachyon radar. Locking on . . . they have a lock. Hotel six should commence missile firing in less than five seconds.”
“Thank you, Mr. Bartoli.”
“Max,” Dr. Sahin said in a strangled voice, “aren’t you going to do something?”
“No, Bram,” he answered. “We already did it.”
“Hotel six is opening missile doors on all fourteen forward missile tubes. He is apparently preparing to fire a fourteen-missile salvo,” Bartoli said. Then as an aside, “They must really, really want us dead.” Pause. About two seconds. “Warheads armed. Missile tubes are energized. Missile drives powering up. He’s ready to fire in all respects. Explosion! Explosion! Explosion! Again! Again! Still more! All fourteen missile tubes have ruptured with missiles still in their tubes. Sir, I’m reading several, no, make that dozens, of bulkhead breaches. At least forty, maybe more. Secondary explosions throughout the ship. There’s some more! Hull breach! Multiple hull breaches! Her fusion reactor just shut down; she’s on her fission auxiliary now. Another set of secondary explosions. I think she just lost most or all of her maneuvering thrusters too.”
“Whatever did you do to them?” Sahin asked.
“Mr. Sauvé,” said Max, “why don’t you do the honors?”
“We tricked the missiles into firing their drives at full power in the launch tubes,” Sauvé explained. “Krag computer security on the ship is just too good—just about everything that could be used for any kind of sabotage requires a biometric authentication from inside the ship, you see—so we couldn’t spoof any of the key systems. But we were able to deceive the missiles into thinking that they were being fired from the pylons of a fighter, where they’re programmed to run their drives up to full thrust immediately, instead of from a ship’s launch tubes, where they are programmed to wait until they’re clear of the ship.”
“How much thrust is that?” Sahin asked.
“Something like 40,000,000 Newtons.”
“Astonishing. Humankind went to the moon with less. It’s a wonder the ship survived at all.”
“The Krag build them very, very strong,” DeCosta interjected.
Max turned to the tactical officer. “Current status on Hotel six, Mr. Bartoli?”
“Heavy internal damage throughout the forward quarter of the ship. She’s not going anywhere for at least ten or fifteen minutes, sir. Her main reactor is definitely off-line. We don’t know the exact restart time for the fusion reaction on this class. It’s possible that she is damaged beyond capability for restart. All forward missile tubes out of commission indefinitely. No pulse-cannon until she has the fusion reactor online to supply plasma. Maneuvering thrusters are out because the explosions blew the hydrazine tanks. There are several fires: secondary combustion started by missile drive plasma, as well as primary from the hydrazine. Other missile tubes appear to be operational, but she can’t turn to unmask them, so she can’t fire on us for now. Her comms and computers all seem to work, plus life support, artificial grav, and most other systems, including deflectors and blast-suppression fields. She’s also leaking nitrogen tetroxide from some of her hull breaches, which leads me to believe that some of those tanks are blown too. Not only is that stuff hypergolic with the hydrazine, which is why they have it onboard in the first place, it’s extremely toxic, so they may have several compartments that are now a toxic atmosphere hazard.”
“Why don’t we blast it to pieces, then?” asked Dr. Sahin.
“You heard the man,” said Max. “He’s still got deflectors and blast suppression. Not to mention a three-meter-thick armored hull. We would have to fire every missile we have just to inflict some real damage. No, we have better plans for our friend.”
Chin spoke up. “Sir, intercepting comm traffic between Hotel six and the other Krag ships. Getting a good decrypt. He says he’s heavily damaged and drifting. He’s transmitting our position and ordering them to close the range and to fire their missiles—coordinated fire, time on target, as soon as possible.” He stopped and listened to his back room for a moment. “And he’s instructing them to manually disable the IFF modules on every missile they fire. He’s ordering Hotel seven to do the fire-control calculations, time the launches, and provide to the other ships the parameters to program the missiles for a flank attack to be sure that, from the perspective of the missile-seeker heads, there is a safe angular separation between their ship and us.” Pause. “Hotel seven acknowledges.” Pause. “Hotel seven is telling the other ships to stand by for firing instructions.” Pause. “Transmitting firing instructions. I’m relaying the decrypt on those to CO, XO, and all combat consoles.”
“Very good, Mr. Chin.”
“Hotels one, three, four, five, seven, and eight are all changing course,” announced Bartoli. “Settling in on new courses—constant bearing decreasing range. Not in any hurry, though. They’re all accelerating at the standard for their various classes.”
“They’re planning to let their missiles do the work,” said Max.
“An excellent tactic,” said DeCosta, smiling.
“I highly recommend it,” answered Max.
“Hotels one, three, four, five, seven, and eight all firing,” said Bartoli. Short pause. “And they’re not kidding, either. Total number of incoming missiles . . . thirty. Repeat, three zero incoming Vampires.” He read off the bearings to each group of missiles, one for each attacking enemy ship. “Missiles are dialed in at different velocities. Speeds are synchronized for a time-on-target arrival. ETA, one minute, forty-three seconds. Bearings changing slowly on all missiles—they appear to be programmed to fly to a waypoint on our port beam, where they will turn and go to terminal attack mode; that way when they are making their final runs, the missiles’ seeker heads will see at least a forty-degree separation between Hotel six and us to prevent them from targeting their own ship. They appear to be on course.”
“But I thought the enemy believed we were essentially helpless,” Bram said.
“As far as we can tell, they do,” Max responded.
“Then wouldn’t thirty missiles represent a commitment of ordnance greatly in excess of that necessary to bring about our destru
ction? I’m sure you naval types have a suitably testosterone-laden term for that sort of thing.”
“Overkill. We call it overkill. And actually, if we were as crippled as we have let on, four missiles would be overkill. Thirty would be insane, screaming, maniacal, blood-guzzling obsession. Which seems to be Krag SOP for dealing with the Cumberland since we delivered the NEVER message.” He glanced at the tactical display and then at the chrono, after which he said to the compartment at large, “Things are about to get a little hairy, gentlemen. Mr. LeBlanc, are you and your men ready for some skin-of-your-teeth maneuvering?”
“Sir,” LeBlanc said as a warm grin spread across his friendly features, “if you’ve got the balls to order it, we’ve got the skill to fly it.”
“Well said, Mr. LeBlanc,” Max said, smiling. “Very well said.”
A few tense seconds ticked by. No one spoke as they watched the tiny, twinkling motes in the tactical display representing the missiles converge on the point at which they would turn to attack the Cumberland. No one, except perhaps for Mr. Bartoli, whose job it was—and Mr. Levy, who could not help himself—to calculate how many deadly megatons those motes signified.
Bartoli broke the spell. “Vampires have reached the waypoint and are going subluminal, average bearing two-five-two mark one-one-seven, range 545,060 kilometers.” Pause. “Vampires now turning toward us and preparing to go into terminal attack mode. In five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. NOW.”
“Missile targeting scanner detections, bearings consistent with Vampires,” said Kasparov.
“Phase FOUR: Execute,” said Max, adrenalin making his voice louder than he intended.
LeBlanc patted Fleishman on the shoulder. The Drives man shoved the controller all the way to the stop and then turned a ring around the controller stalk, illuminating a purple light in Engineering. As a result the Cumberland’s drive went to Emergency, and Chief Engineer Brown—responding to the light—disabled the safeties and governors on the main sublight drive, enhancing Cumberland’s already extraordinary acceleration. The ship sprang forward, like a cheetah darting out from behind a clump of grass in pursuit of a particularly tasty gazelle, straight at the crippled Krag battlecruiser.
Not only were the Krag caught flat-footed by this unexpected development, but so were their missiles, which had been programmed on the assumption that the Cumberland was dead in space. Determining that nothing in their targeting instructions for this particular launch covered this eventuality, they reverted to their default targeting and intercept mode: they pointed their seeker heads right at the Cumberland, even as it rapidly approached the crippled battlecruiser, and accelerated to follow.
Meanwhile, Nelson abruptly ceased his now-irrelevant sophisticated theatrics. He shut down the emulation emitters, ending the Cumberland’s masquerade as a heavily damaged vessel. Further, since the redlined main sublight drive’s exhaust was bright enough to be seen by the Mark One Eyeball for at least a million kilometers in every direction, he abandoned all efforts at stealth, even to the degree of extending all of the ship’s thermal radiator fins, bleeding heat from the heavily stressed heat sink bright red into space.
Now plainly visible to every conceivable sensor and violating half a dozen regulations regarding safe combat maneuvers (an oxymoron if there ever was one), Cumberland closed on the battlecruiser, first on a collision course and then veering off at the last microsecond to hug the contours of the giant ship’s hull, at times coming within a meter and a half of its metal skin. The more experienced crew members could feel the almost imperceptible bumps and jolts through their feet as the ship collided with and clipped off various small antennae, emitters, sensor masts, and other nonstructural objects protruding from the Krag vessel’s hull.
In a blur of relative motion, the gigantic Krag battlecruiser seemed to flash past the rapidly accelerating Cumberland in less than a second, the destroyer traversing the battlecruiser’s defensive firing arcs too fast for its degraded antiship point-defense systems to be able to lock on. There was only the tooth-rattling WHAM! WHAM! as two point-defense rail-gun rounds slammed into the aft hull as the smaller ship pulled away, the high-tech bullets robbed of most of their punch by the Cumberland’s rapid acceleration along the projectiles’ line of travel. In an instant she was astern of the giant ship, running as fast as her legs could carry her.
As the Cumberland had dashed out of their initial firing solution, the thirty missiles fired by the remaining ships of the containment group had turned radically to keep their fleeing target centered in their seeker heads’ field of view and pursued it in a roughly cylindrical pack, closing from the destroyer’s seven o’clock position. Unfortunately for the battlecruiser, as soon as the destroyer got within 9.427 meters of the larger ship and came between it and the missiles, the missiles’ sensors lacked the resolution to distinguish the Cumberland and the battlecruiser as two separate targets, a fact now known to the Cumberland’s crew by virtue of the captured data. Accordingly, the weapons’ targeting logic concluded that the huge object in front of them was a single very large and very attractive enemy target and altered their course to strike that object dead center, completely losing their lock on the Cumberland.
Ordinarily the missiles’ IFF systems would have identified the battlecruiser as a friendly vessel and aborted their attack. But because the Cumberland had earlier used the IFF system against its makers, the Krag attack group commander onboard the battlecruiser—exactly as the Tiger Team predicted—had ordered that the weapons’ IFF systems be disabled. The Krag warships, he assured them, need only make certain of their targets before firing, and fire from a position ensuring an adequate angular separation between the battlecruiser and the destroyer.
The battlecruiser didn’t stand a chance. The Krag command crew scarcely had time to be first shocked and then terrified that the supposedly crippled destroyer had sprung into motion with the missiles in its wake before all thirty superluminal thermonuclear weapons delivered their warheads within microseconds of each other. They exploded as one, instantly consuming the enormous and powerful Krag vessel—and with it, the attack group commander—in an irregular, roiling cataclysm of brilliant, swirling plasma.
With six Krag ships still out there—six Krag ships to which the doomed battlecruiser had just sent the Cumberland’s exact location as of only a few moments before—there was no time for jubilation (save for the occasional “Yes!” and a dozen or so fist pumps around CIC). As the battlecruiser’s funeral pyre slowly dimmed behind them, Max called out, “Phase Five: EXECUTE!”
Under LeBlanc’s guidance, the three men at Maneuvering steered the ship through a maneuver known as a “flapjack,” in which the ship flipped itself over bow for stern. Fleishman at Drives reduced the engine setting from Emergency to Flank, the still-powerful thrust of the main sublight engines pushing against the ship’s forward momentum, gradually slowing it, then pushing it back in the direction from which it came. Within a few moments, LeBlanc had Fleishman rapidly reduce the thrust, and under his expert direction, the Cumberland glided back into the center of the still-dissipating fireball created by the battlecruiser’s destruction, which had screened the course reversal maneuver from the other Krag ships and which now helped shield them from enemy sensors. The thirty warheads created a zone of space more than 2000 kilometers in diameter, full of plasma and powerful electromagnetic disruption that, even as the immense nuclear fireball cooled and dissipated, would be opaque to most sensor scans for more than half an hour.
Following the minutely developed plan formulated by the Special Attack Tiger Team, Kasparov signaled the men in his back room to launch two highly stealthy Mark XLVIII sensor drones, which popped out on opposite sides of the fireball to provide the destroyer with sensor information unobstructed by superheated plasma, electromagnetic fields, and bomb residue.
“All deflectors at maximum,” announced Shimomura from Deflector Control. Even as it spread and cooled, the fireball left by the detonation of thirty ther
monuclear warheads was still a dangerous place.
“Very well,” answered Max.
Two minutes passed. “Beginning to get sensor returns from the drones,” said Kasparov. “Target motion analysis in progress.”
“Mr. Nelson, how much longer can we safely radiate?” Max asked.
“The fireball is attenuating and cooling rapidly, sir. To be on the safe side, I would like to retract the radiator fins in about a minute and a half,” the Stealth officer replied.
“Very well, Mr. Nelson. Retract at your discretion.” Max reflexively checked the heat sink status, which his console was programmed to display at all times. It showed that the ship’s heat storage capacity had gone from 98 percent of maximum to 18 percent. By the time Nelson retracted the fins, it would be 15 or 16 percent. Max would have liked to get it down to 2 percent or so, but it would have to do.
“TMA coming in now,” said Kasparov. “Enemy vessel positions plotted in the tactical display.” He then rattled off the bearings and ranges to all six targets as the red dots representing the computer’s best calculation of their positions appeared in the 3D tactical display and on the 2D tactical overview displays on several consoles around the compartment.
“Hotels one, three, five, seven, and eight are arrayed in a ring or pentagon and will pass our position with the fireball remnant in the center of the ring,” Bartoli said, offering the tactical assessment. “They are actively scanning the area beyond the fireball along our former course, apparently assuming we are still on the run. Hotel four is hanging back outside of the formation, approximately 27,000 kilometers. Based on standard Krag tactical doctrine, that would make Hotel four the new apparent attack group leader. Just as a reminder, Hotel four is a Crusader class light cruiser. He is on a course tangential to the fireball—he’ll just graze the outside edge.”
Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3) Page 6
